“No sign of anyone.”
“I’d like to go back and have a chat with the father and son, but I need you to approve it.”
“Can you tell me anything more?”
“No.”
“What does Max say?”
“He’s in agreement.”
“Then so am I. Do your best to come back in one piece.”
The Patanès’ house had had its roof ripped off by the tornado. Huge plastic tarps covered the roof, now stripped of its terra-cotta tiles, until the construction workers could tend to it. A neighbor told me that they’d moved to a small house made available by the township of Dolo. It wasn’t far away and it only took me a few minutes to find it. A small yard and a single-story building designed for the handicapped. As I approached the privet hedge surrounding the yard, I peeked into the kitchen where Signora Patanè was making dinner. I walked all the way around the house, but it seemed that the woman was alone just then.
I guessed that the father and son were out on their usual walk, and I waited for them, sitting in my car, continuing the therapy advised by Catfish with a piece of “contaminated blues” by the Funky Butt Brass Band.
I checked my cell phone for texts from Cora. Though I had my hands full with a situation that meant beginning to draw up a list of the soon-to-be dead, the jazz woman was still always on my mind. I wanted to see her, love her, wrap her in my arms and kiss her.
I was hopelessly in love. But I’d never uttered a word to convey that concept to her clearly. I was afraid I’d chase her away. She’d always been careful not to let slip a single word that would violate the code to which illicit lovers adhered. Strictly by the book, even though I was certain she liked me, a lot, and that she thought about me and desired me in return.
But we were both well aware that I had nothing to offer her. I was the lover she’d say goodbye to someday.
I pushed the off button on the stereo when I saw the wheelchair emerge from a narrow side street.
Father and son were walking in silence, faces strained with tension. Between their damaged home and the two former mercenaries on the run, they must not have been feeling very comfortable.
I got out of the car and headed toward them, putting on a nonchalance that I did not, in fact, possess.
As soon as Ferdinando saw me, he stopped pushing the wheelchair. They were both staring at me, with different expressions. Fear and contempt.
Lorenzo was a tough nut. He was convinced he had nothing to lose and maybe that was true.
“You should hear me out,” I said, showing them I wasn’t hiding a recording device. “We want to give you a chance to find a way out.”
“Why such a magnanimous gesture?” the young man snickered.
“To limit the number of deaths and the general fallout from a gang war,” I explained, as if I were a broker explaining to a customer why it’s in his interest to invest in the stock of a given company. “Bellomo and Adinolfi can eliminate some of your enemies, but then what are they going to do? Go back to pulling draft beers until someone walks into the Bad Boys Pub and rubs them out?”
I leveled my forefinger straight at Lorenzo, who seemed to have been seriously stunned by the fact that I knew the names of his accomplices. “You don’t give a fuck about your parents. You’ve made that clear, but after them it’ll be your turn. And you’re wrong if you think they won’t find a horrible way to make you die. There was an Albanian, once, a guy just like you, who acted like a smartass because he was convinced he had nothing to lose. He was a big enough asshole to besmirch the memory of a local boss’s father. You know what they did to him? They locked him in a cellar full of starving rats. They heard him scream for days.”
Ferdinando Patanè gave in to the tension and sat down on the edge of a low wall. “I always said it would end badly,” he stammered in a broken voice.
“Shut up!” his son ordered. “I can’t stand you when you act like this.”
“You have no chance of getting out alive,” I insisted. “The time has come to talk and find a solution.”
“Which would be?” Lorenzo finally made up his mind to ask, announcing a de facto surrender.
“Bellomo and Adinolfi, along with with Kevin Fecchio, raped, tortured, and murdered Luigina Cantarutti. One of the two must die,” I replied in a flat voice. “And after that, you have to compensate Sergio, Luigina’s son, by paying him three hundred thousand euros.”
I was pretty sure that they weren’t in possession of such a huge sum, but this wasn’t the time to haggle.
The two of them stared at me as if I were crazy. Ferdinando’s jaw actually dropped.
“What you’re asking is impossible,” Lorenzo muttered. Fear was finally forcing him to think.
“Not a bit,” I retorted. “You just need to take one more step down the ladder of criminal degradation, and so far you’ve shown yourself more than able to do that.”
“Perhaps we should confess everything to the carabinieri,” the father broke in; he was clearly having trouble breathing.
“It’s a respectable option,” I acknowledged. “We don’t like it because we’d lose the money earmarked for young Sergio, but it would certainly help to prevent future bloodshed. And it would result in the trial of the century, with the spotlight on your son, the criminal mastermind, who planned home invasions and brutal murders and was ready and willing to betray a man as popular as Kevin Fecchio. Your lawyer will certainly have a hard time trying to talk the court out of sending him to a penitentiary clinic where he’ll spend the rest of his life sucking other convicts’ dicks.”
Ferdinando Patanè burst into tears. His son did have a point: The old man was a real crybaby. I handed him a piece of paper with a cell phone number jotted down on it.
“We want a meeting with Bellomo and Adinolfi, too,” I said. “You’ll have to be present. Call me when you’re ready.”
“You really have no pity!” the father sobbed in anger.
“Pity died with Luigina,” I reminded him. “In these kinds of situations, there’s never room for friendly feeling. You’ve shown you can think like low-ranking Mafiosi. Keep that up and you’ll be fine.”
I turned on my heels and left, abandoning the two of them to a grim despair they’d never be able to shake.
As for me, though, I was more than satisfied. Lorenzo had immediately given up all brash trash-talking, proof that the two ex-mercenaries were by no means capable of resolving the situation. They’d have to hide out somewhere while they tried to figure out what to do next.
And then there was a chance we could wrap up the whole mess, I’m not going to say discreetly, as we’d hoped, but at least without attracting attention from cops and reporters, who certainly had better things to do than to dig into a case they would have all much preferred to leave unexamined.
In prison, in order to survive and to keep the place from becoming even more unlivable, I’d invented a job as peacemaker among the various underworld factions. A hard, challenging, dangerous calling, but one that taught me to understand mindsets and behaviors and, above all, to understand that the more a door seemed to be locked, the harder you needed to keep on knocking.
For that reason, after briefly informing my partners as to my plans, I headed for Piove di Sacco to resume discussions with Gigliola Pescarotto.
At that time of night the knitwear plant was closed and I studied the GPS map to find the best way to approach her house without risking surprises. I was positive she’d ignored my advice to leave town for a while.
I parked two streets away and cautiously ventured closer, hugging the hedges in front of the yards. The dogs caught my scent immediately, but I wasn’t too worried. In the summer dogs bark for no reason at all and the owners usually aren’t too alarmed. The widow’s house was shrouded in darkness, and here and there a few shafts of light filtered out through the closed roller sh
utters. I stood there, watching from the shelter of a tree. After ten or so minutes, I noticed the blaze of a lighter and then the dot of a cigarette ember that glowed red with every puff.
It had to be either Giacomo or Denis. Probably one was staying inside while the other one hid in the darkness outside. So the widow had chosen to wage war. She’d spirited her daughter to safety and now she was waiting for the butchers who had murdered her husband. It wasn’t an intelligent strategy—assuming of course that she hadn’t devised some other diabolical twist.
I went back to my car and called her.
“That wasn’t very nice of you, trying to kill me the other day,” I said.
“Don’t exaggerate. I just wanted to do a little embroidery work on your face to convince you to be more cooperative.”
“Horseshit. You lost control,” I shot back. “Anyway, I assumed you were on the Riviera and instead you’re barricaded in your home with a gorilla standing guard that even a blind man wouldn’t miss.”
She remained silent for ten seconds or so, the time it took her to understand I wasn’t far away. “Where are you?”
“Nearby, if that’s what you’re asking, but it never crossed my mind to come pay a call on you,” I replied. “For now I’m happy just to talk. Nicola Spezzafumo could be a subject we both find interesting.”
“And why would that be?”
“Yesterday he crossed the line. And he’s never stepping back over it.”
“That’s what you say.”
“You know that’s how things are going to go.”
“So what if they do?”
“Well then, we might be able to make a deal. Either you and his orphans devote yourselves to honest, hardworking lives here in the homeland, or else you emigrate to the Americas like Venetians in the nineteenth century, and every last reason we might have to bicker will be forgotten.”
More silence. Longer this time. “It seems to me like an offer to be taken into consideration.”
I closed my eyes to concentrate on every single word. “Then we can talk it over,” I confirmed.
“Of course we can! The sooner we end this mess, the better it is for everyone.”
“Nick is an old friend of yours,” I countered.
“And I’ll remember him fondly for as long as I live,” said Gigliola.
She was lying. I was sure of it. By now she was an open book. After Kevin Fecchio’s murder, she’d understood that she could start the gang back up, continue with the old plan to pull off a few more jobs, and then leave the country. And flourish somewhere else. Tear off the mask of a grieving widow and become what she’d always dreamed of.
With Nicola Spezzafumo in place of Gastone Oddo. Probably they were already planning a robbery, no matter how clear old Rossini had been when he’d warned them not to keep any of their criminal activities up.
With her and Spezzafumo, there was no room for negotiation, but taking it to the bitter end would mean a defeat for everyone. For the living and for the dead. I was sure she’d done her math and double-checked it; I was also confident she’d taken into account the fact that our rules prohibited sending a mother whose daughter had no father into a premature grave, even if that mother was a criminal of Gigliola Pescarotto’s caliber.
The unwritten laws that guided the world of illegal activities were complicated and difficult to interpret. They were part of a world on the verge of extinction, a world to which we stubbornly belonged. The globalization of organized crime that represented the onset of modernity had eliminated all these laws. The only regulatory bonds guiding organizations now were relationships of force. We were among the few free men still scrupulously observing the rules. It was the only way to protect the weak, the victims. Along with our consciences.
I went back to Padua and dropped by Pico’s. This wasn’t the right evening to see Cora but I wanted to have a chat with the piano player. When the jazz woman was off, he played in a trio with a guitarist and a clarinetist.
I waited for the first intermission to intercept him at the bar.
“Can I get you something?”
He glared at me. “He’s the one you ought to treat to a drink,” he replied, pointing at the barman who nodded with a smile.
“Okay, but do you mind if I ask why?”
“Last night, Cora’s husband handed me ten euros to tell him if there was anyone buzzing around her,” he snickered while he made a gin and tonic.
My blood ran cold. “And what did you tell him?”
“That I didn’t know a thing. For ten euros I’m not getting my hands dirty, but for fifty . . .”
I pulled out my wallet and slapped two fifty-euro bills down on the table. “One of these is for you and the other one covers the musicians’ tabs.”
He made them disappear with all the skill of a prestidigitator.
“Then what did the husband do?” I asked.
“Nothing. He listened and left before the show was over.”
“Did she see him?”
“I’ll say she did! I’ve never seen her so pissed off.”
And once they both got back home, there would have been a screaming fight. I felt sorry for Cora. She didn’t want her husband to discover her island of freedom but I couldn’t keep the secret; it would only have made him more suspicious. “What a fucking mess,” I thought to myself, as I decided to stay on and drink another couple of glasses.
I got home slightly tipsy and was introduced to Antun and Dalibor, two taciturn Dalmatians that old Rossini had called in, just in case we ended up needing to use our guns. They were both more or less Beniamino’s age, and they looked so menacing that I decided not to ask them any questions about their pasts. In the former Yugoslavia, organized crime hadn’t remained neutral and on more than one occasion had played a decisive role in operations of ethnic cleansing.
“Rossini is coming back,” Max informed me. “There’s absolutely no one anywhere near the boy.”
I gestured to our guests with a nod. “We have our own mercenaries,” I whispered.
“You’re wrong,” the fat man retorted. “They’re here out of friendship. Rossini is godfather to their grandchildren, but that doesn’t mean they’re not ‘lethal killing machines.’ That’s how our friend described them.”
“I’m going to bed,” I announced. To help me fall asleep, I searched for an especially soporific channel. I concentrated on a televised sale of toiletry products for senior citizens. I collapsed without even getting up to turn off the TV.
We all have our own little obsessions, our harmless idiosyncrasies that, with the years, become routine. I, for instance, quickly tire of any given shaving cream. After a couple of months I toss it out because I can’t stand it anymore. An appointment, every morning, with the same blend of scents, the same consistency of foam, annoys me and, at the same time, makes me suspect that the shaving cream in question isn’t of the highest quality or, in any, case isn’t well suited to my skin.
And so I bade farewell to a Portuguese shaving cream beloved of barbers all over the world since the turn of the twentieth century, tossing the tube into the trash.
I decided that very same morning to visit a popular perfumery in the center of town where a shopgirl, a particularly cute one, by the way, had no difficulty talking me into purchasing expensive niche products that, to judge from their packaging, looked more like old leftovers from some warehouse.
The kitchen table was set as if for a wedding feast, certainly not for breakfast. Beniamino’s two friends had brought a number of bottles of plum grappa, as well as sheep’s milk cheeses.
I tossed back a couple of shots before dipping a croissant into my caffè latte. During my second cigarette, smoked in blessed peace, absorbed in the reading of one of the many daily papers purchased by the fat man, the cell phone rang. The one whose number only the Patanès knew.
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�Hello?”
“We agree to a meeting,” Ferdinando stammered.
“At ten o’clock tonight on the banks of the canal where poor Kevin ‘committed suicide.’ You know the place well.”
I went back to the kitchen, where Max was holding forth on the Greek situation, which still dominated the front page of all the newspapers. “Tonight we have the Patanès,” I announced.
“Good!” Beniamino exclaimed. “Finally something’s starting to move. But in the meanwhile, we have to make sure we don’t lose track of Spezzafumo.”
“I’ll take care of it,” I said and went to get dressed. Before going out I pulled a couple of rolls of cash out of a hiding place built into a credenza by some clever carpenter. There were a couple more hiding places scattered around the apartment. We only used cash. We had no bank accounts, and we were completely unfamiliar with credit and debit cards. Leaving traces of your cash transactions was dangerous for individuals who have ‘no visible means of support,’ as was printed clearly on our files, still preserved in the archives at police headquarters.
First, I went to see my favorite salesclerk in the shaving section. She broke all the old records by convincing me to buy the entire toiletries line put out by an English house that I’d never heard of before. But she was unable to talk me into the eau de toilette that brought out the fragrance of the aftershave lotion. I’d been using the same eau de toilette for years. It had first been given to me by a woman I’d never forgotten and it carried the name of the sword of the Ottoman knights. Over time, I’d learned to distinguish the top notes from the middle and base notes, and when you’re that in tune with a scent, you must never make the mistake of switching to another.
Carrying an elegant paper sack with the shop’s logo, I went to a tall building on the outskirts of the downtown. On the sixth floor were the offices of an insurance company. The secretary knew me by sight and wrongly believed I was a client. Between a smile and a flurry of comments on the new heat wave, which the weathermen had dubbed Charon, she ushered me into a claustrophobic waiting room where I leafed through financial planning magazines.
For All the Gold in the World Page 13